Interpretive Issues in “Solomon and the Queen”
Category : Interpretation , Translation
By Sohaib Saeed
Quranica’s feature film Solomon and the Queen is, first and foremost, a showcase of the beauty of the Qur’an’s message and narrative style, through a masterful recitation by the renowned Egyptian qari, Hajjaj Ramadan al-Hindawi. When we gave him the stage on the last day of his Scotland tour in 2006, we did not tell him what to recite. He recited those verses from Surat al-Naml, and the rest is history.
When the time came to edit it to coincide with Quranica’s ten-year anniversary and re-launch, it was clear that the beauty of that original event deserved a fresh approach to editing and production. And so the idea to weave in commentary (as well as providing real-time translation, as we had done in most live events) was born.
Read: The Making of “Solomon and the Queen”
Here I shall provide some insight into the process of research and selection of opinions. I consulted a large number of works of tafsir, as well as a few which fall outside that genre but discussed, for example, female personalities in the Qur’an (including Bilqis). I knew that what we needed in this film was not a full tafsir, but a simple commentary which would aid reflection. Although I needed to answer all the questions in my own mind, I did not wish to impose those answers on the viewers.